Bangalore: Microsoft has been fined with $732 million by the European Union for disrespecting antitrust settlement with the latter’s regulators. However, the Union’s top antitrust regulator said that his department bore some of the responsibility towards company’s failure of respecting the settlement and also being fined.

According to the European Union’s competition commissioner Joaquin Almunia, it was important to maintain legal binding commitments and that they played a significant role in enforcement policies as they provided rapid solutions to problems. A failure to comply was a serious infringement.

Microsoft has agreed to alter Windows for five years giving users of newly purchased computers a ballot screen to easily download browsers from the internet, and turn off Microsoft’s browser, Internet Explorer.

At the end of 2011, Microsoft had told the commission that it had been abiding by the deal. But the company failed to add ballot screens in certain products from May 2011. This affected more than 15 million European users and this was highlighted last July when other companies reported the inconvenience.

Microsoft however said that it was their responsibility of committing the error and that they had taken further measures to avoid the mistake in the future.

Now that Almunia said that attempts to reach Google were continuing which was not related to the decision taken against Microsoft. But the fine was a sense of warning to other companies as well.

But Almunia had said that there were no decisions made to see whether a trustee was appointed to check whether Microsoft was still adhering to the rest of its compliance in the browser case until 2014.

However this is the first decision against Microsoft , being the first company fined for not respecting the settlement. Now that Microsoft offers a browser choice in its latest Windows 8 operating systems in Europe said that it was prepared to extend this system up to 2014, with an addition of 15 months in order to make up for its error. But this plan of moving forward seemed unclear as reported by New York Times.

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